North of Boston (11 page)

“Ned was receiving these bonuses?”

“He was one of the first to get them.”

“How many others got them?”

“Eight, nine, ten, I'd say. The number changed each time, but not by much. They were a core group. Trustworthy, seasoned fishermen, most of them. A few young ones, not many.”

“Hmm. Same amount for each name on the list?”

“Yes. Each man got the same amount, but each time I got a list, the amount would be different.”

“How much, roughly?”

“Anywhere from five to fifteen thousand. Average ten, I'd say.”

“Any idea what was going on?”

“No. They were silent as tombs, all of them. That in itself was unusual, but then I noticed that the bonuses were given out after they'd all been together on a particular boat, a long-liner the company's owned since, oh, 1998, I think. It's called the
Sea Wolf
.”

We are rounding another bend. The asphalt under our feet turns to gravel. Huge rhododendron bushes push their way onto the path. I start to feel uneasy. It's darker here—there aren't any people, and a few of the lights seem to be out in the iron lampposts up ahead. I'm about to steer Mrs. Smith back to the boathouse, but before I can suggest it, she hooks her arm in mine.

“Just a little longer,” she says. “Right before Ned left the company, there was that business with the lobster boat. That was hush-hush, too. I took care of the paperwork, but I knew something was wrong.”

“You wrote a note on the bottom of the invoice.
May the wind be always at your back.
”

“It's an Irish blessing, dear.
May the road rise to meet you, may the wind be always at your back, and may God hold you in the palm of His hand.
I felt something even then, you know. Right here.” She presses her clenched hand into her chest. “I was worried about him. It kept me up at night. And then . . . well, you of all people know what happened.”

Jasper sits down suddenly, ears erect. He whines, peers intently into the woods. There's a hill beyond the trees, and on the other side of it, the beginning of Boston's famous chain of parks, the Emerald Necklace, where you definitely don't want to be after dark.

“Look, Jasper hears something,” Mrs. Smith says.

“Let's turn around now.” I'm increasingly on edge for some reason, listening for crunching twigs and rolling pebbles, footsteps behind us on the path.

“Oh, don't worry. There's nothing to be afraid of. I'm out here every night with Jasper. These lights here are out, but there are others up ahead, and then it's just a little while until we're back where we started.”

I agree reluctantly and pat the small dry hand that's resting in the crook of my arm, pull it in a little tighter.

Mrs. Smith frowns as she searches for the thread of her story. “There was something about the
Sea Wolf
I meant to say. . . . Yes, that's it. About the regular paychecks. It was a bookkeeper's nightmare. I went mad trying to figure it out. You see, when the
Sea Wolf
came back from these voyages, the haul size would be smaller than usual. Quite small, in fact. So the men's regular paychecks would be smaller, too, because their commissions would be less. But expenses for fuel and provisioning were as high as ever, and days at sea would be fourteen to twenty-one every time. That's long enough to haul a lot more groundfish than they were bringing in. I felt like calling Captain Lou and saying,
What were you doing out there, playing bingo?
”

“Captain Lou?”

“Lou Diggens. One of the core group. Captains every voyage of the
Sea Wolf
.”

“Did you ever ask him what was going on?”

“No, no. It's rude to ask a fisherman why his catch is small. Like asking a pitcher why he keeps throwing balls instead of strikes. I did ask Dustin, though. Several times. He'd get very stern and tell me there was nothing unusual about the
Sea Wolf
's voyages. I think he forgot I know more about fishing than he does. In any case, even though the crew members' regular paychecks were small, the bonuses more than made up for it. Overall they were doing remarkably well for a relatively brief voyage.”

“You think—”

“Yes, I think they were using the long-liner for some unofficial business, and paying the men with the so-called bonuses, off the record. Then they were bringing in a small haul of groundfish to make the trip look legitimate.” She glances at me, feisty and complacent. “The doctors tell me that my brain has been aging, but I wasn't so far gone that I couldn't see what was right before my eyes!”

The entrance to the pond is up ahead. There are floodlights, the hum of traffic, a yellow lab and its master headed our way. I breathe a little easier. There was nothing to be afraid of: I'm overtired; that's all. It's hard to sleep in an apartment that's been broken into. I wake up and hold my breath, wondering if someone is there. On the street I find myself staring at people suspiciously. Was
that
man the intruder? Or was it
him
? Or was I just a little crazy that day, smelling things that weren't even there?

A cruiser has pulled onto the service road next to the boathouse. Joggers pass. Children play. A guy in a baseball cap sits on a bench, looking over the water. There's nothing to worry about. I offer to walk Mrs. Smith home, but she declines, so I accompany her to the crosswalk and punch the button. Cars whiz along the Jamaicaway, sliding across lanes, taking the curves. This is probably one of the most dangerous streets in America. The light turns red. The cars that didn't streak through the yellow screech to a stop, and the Walk sign flashes on the other side of the street.

“You'll find out what it's all about, won't you?” Mrs. Smith's eyes look directly into mine. “Just promise that you'll be careful. I want to know everything. Stay in touch. I'll worry if I don't hear from you.”

“I'll find out. I promise.”

I hate to let her toddle across four lanes of halted vehicles filled with impatient drivers, but she only smiles and says, “Don't worry. Jasper and I will be fine.”

I
t's an in-house focus group, but everyone calls it a sniff party. As I enter the conference room, I can feel the excitement and stress. A banquet table covered by a white cloth displays some packaging possibilities and advertising mock-ups from McKenzie and Ross, the outside firm that does Inessa Mark's promotions. The account executive, a man with the solid American name of John Rodgers, is sitting at the large conference table in the middle of the room with his assistant, Jay, and the four women and two men who compose Inessa Mark's in-house staff. They are drinking to-go coffee from Starbucks and Perrier from plastic cups. John Rodgers and Jay look slick, aggressive, and comfortable, as marketing people should.

At a second banquet table, fluttering like a nervous moth, is Jean-Luc Laboure, the thirtysomething half-Italian Frenchman who has created several Inessa Mark scents over the years and whom Maureen contracted to develop this new scent under her direction. He works for Moreau, a large perfume lab and manufacturer out of France, and will see no money from Inessa Mark until Maureen approves the scent, the pricing, and the manufacturing schedule. At this stage of the proceedings, Maureen has Jean-Luc over a barrel. If and when Moreau becomes the supplier, he could conceivably dick her around, but because he wants the next contract, he won't.

Five small glass vials, each half filled with an amber liquid, each on a white china plate, are set in a straight line across the long table. Before each vial is a small triangle of note card with an identifying code: A37, 45X, #22, P-40, and #3. There's no point in asking what these elaborate alphanumeric combinations mean. Perfumers are intensely secretive about their formulas, almost paranoid, and the labels are not meant to be understood.

Jean-Luc stalks the front of the table, checking the placement of the vials exactly, straightening the little cards. For freshening the nasal palate, he has provided two small bowls filled with coffee beans, and these he moves here and there, looking for the best locations. He can't help being nervous. He is about to place his creative children at the mercy of people with more-or-less ordinary noses. What's worse is that these kinds of products are far from the elegant fragrances he dreamed of making when he was a young perfumer's assistant back in Grasse. No doubt the task of creating something “fresh and fruity” for the American teenage girl kept him up at night with migraines of despair, but everyone needs work these days.

Maureen is flitting around the room, murmuring pleasantries. She has chosen an exquisitely tailored geometric black-and-white dress à la Coco Chanel for the occasion. The homage to Coco, though it will go unnoticed by most and only embarrass her if it is remarked upon, is no accident, I assume. It says something about her ambition and self-doubt.

Maureen gets the focus group's attention and explains the process, and eight of us line up at the table. John Rodgers, Jay, and Jean-Luc do not participate. We pass down the table as if it were a buffet, taking up each vial in turn, dabbing drops of liquid on our wrists and inner elbows, sniffing, then sniffing again. We have little pads of paper and pencils to jot our notes. We circle around as much as we like. By common agreement, we do not talk much. Discussion will come later, when the choices have been narrowed down.

Milosa slips in late, as usual, and sits at the far end of the conference table. I finish sniffing and join him. Jean-Luc appears at my elbow, a nervous wreck. “It was very
difficile
 . . . with the commission as she wanted it. . . . First
J'ai dit non. . . .
My company insists I must. . . . But so many changes, all new constraints with which I
could
not work. . . .”

“You did your best,” I tell him. “It's a fruit scent to be sold in drugstores. Be paid for your work, and let it go.”

His eyes widen.
“Ce n'est pas l'argent que m'intéresse.”

I spoke too bluntly and offended him. I hug him briefly with affection, and he gives me an injured, forgiving look.

Jean-Luc and I became friends years ago, when we were both in our early twenties, and I asked him to help me re-create my mother's private fragrance. I described the elements I thought I remembered: earthy saffron, black rose, vanilla, patchouli. The old perfumer who had worked with my mother to create it had died, but Jean-Luc was able to confirm with another perfumer in his company that Isa's Scent, as we dubbed it, had been a dark oriental chypre. Jean-Luc suggested adding tree moss to soften the intensity and black truffle to darken the rose. We changed the balance, brought the rose forward and back, mixed in lily, almond, sage, and tinkered endlessly. But with each successive formulation, I would shake my head. We only seemed to be getting further off track. Eventually we gave up. The truth is, people can't really remember smells; we can only recognize them.

Now several staff members are gathered around one young woman's outstretched arm, chiming delightedly over a particular scent. “I love it!” one of them crows. Maureen sniffs the girl's wrist and smiles. She likes this one, too. There's a buzz of merriment as a common preference emerges.

“Wait, wait. Caroline, get the tester strips. We must smell it on paper,” Maureen asserts.

“Why paper?” the young woman asks, holding her wrist up.

“Because . . . ,” Maureen says, losing her train of thought in the excitement. “Just because.”

Soon they are dipping tabs of stiff paper into the vials, waving them in the air to dry, and passing them under their noses.

“Now I like
this
one better,” Caroline says, pointing to X45.

“I'm not sure anymore,” another says in perplexity.

“See, what did I tell you? Scent is very unstable; it can come across quite differently on paper than it does on skin,” Maureen explains.

“Shouldn't it smell good on skin?” one of the women asks.

Maureen gives a crafty smile. “Yes, but . . . we're going to use advertising inserts and scratch-and-sniff displays to sell the product, so we need it to smell good on paper
first
, then skin. Isn't that right, John?”

“Yes, ma'am.” John Rodgers stands at his full height to accept the admiration he's due.

Maureen frowns. “We'll be using a thicker paper than this, won't we, John?”

He nods.

“Something closer to cardboard?”

“Not that thick,” he says.

“Poster board?”

“A little heavier.”

“Well, you'll send us a sample soon, won't you?”

“Absolutely.” His gaze deflects to his assistant, who pulls out a pen.

Maureen looks imperiously at Jean-Luc, whose eyes reflect haughty fear. “Jean-Luc, don't you have to put something in the formula to make the scent
adhere
 . . . you know, to the scratch-and-sniff paper?”

Bloodless as a corpse, Jean-Luc repeats, “Adhere?”

“Otherwise, how will it stick? What I'm asking is, won't you need to make some chemical modifications to bring the fragrance in line with the marketing plan?”

“I will look into it, madame.”

“Yes, but don't take too long, Jean-Luc. We need the formula in a week.”

Briefly, John Rodgers and Jean-Luc square off, shoot subtly hateful glances at each other. Imagining that these two men could agree on anything is like imagining that the north and south poles could overcome their magnetic issues and meet for lunch at the equator.

Maureen turns her attention back to her employees with a schoolmarm's sharp clap of hands. “Girls! Girls! And you boys, too. Did we decide which one we liked?”

The women are giggling over their scent-dampened paper wands like the teenagers they're pretending to be. They quibble, pout, and exclaim. The two men look on with pleasure and take sniffs of outstretched arms. Three samples are easily rejected, but there's a fifty-fifty split between #3 and X45. Maureen tries to break the tie but can't. Her head tips back and forth—
comme ci, comme ça—
as she flutters the two competing tester strips. Finally she spies me sitting at the conference table with Milosa. “Pirio, you decide!”

She dips fresh tester strips into the vials, makes her way to where we're sitting, hands one of them to me with delicate fingers.

I bring it to my nose, inhale. The fruits Maureen wanted are there: strawberry, watermelon. By themselves, sickeningly sweet. But Jean-Luc added a few other tones that lend some depth: there's something dry like lemongrass, a dark woody coloring, and unmistakably pungent lotus. I give Jean-Luc credit for grabbing as much artistic leeway as he could, but there's no disguising that the scent's a total bust. I feel like I'm walking down a hotel corridor, passing a half-eaten strawberry cheesecake from the night before on a room service dish on the floor.

I smile halfheartedly at Jean-Luc, drooped in a nearby chair, and he shrugs as if to say,
What would
you
have done?

“Not this one,” I tell Maureen.

“Right. I didn't think so either.” She hands me the second tester strip. “Try this.”

I close my eyes and breathe. With this, Jean-Luc has given Maureen just what she wanted. Fresh summer air, strawberry shortcake, and bubble gum. It's unlayered, uninteresting, and underwhelming. It's so innocent of aspiration, so devoid of need and want, so self-effacingly nice, it makes me want to cry out with boredom. I smile and hand it back to her. “This is it. Perfect for a twelve-year-old.”

Maureen beams with satisfaction. “I thought so!”

The young women crowd around Maureen, smell the paper wand, shriek with stage delight.

“Congratulations on a job well done, Jean-Luc,” I say drily.

He nods in acute misery.

Milosa doesn't ask to smell Inessa Mark's new scent. He leaves the conference room as the attention shifts to John Rodgers and his packaging concepts. A few minutes later I follow him.

—

Milosa has a corner office at the back of the building. The windows overlook a narrow alley, a small paved area crammed with parked cars and trash barrels, and a brick wall crisscrossed with rusted fire escapes. I only know what the view is from the few times I've been in his office when the vertical blinds were open. Usually, they're closed, as they are now, casting shadows in the corners. On his massive desk, an ornate rococo-style lamp gives off a dim yellowish glow that seems to pull the walls even closer. I can only last a short time in this room before I start to feel trapped.

Milosa is at his computer, his back to me. I have to say hello several times to get his attention. He finally turns and motions for me to sit down, which I do, and, out of a habit that stopped making sense years ago but that I hang on to out of stubbornness, I put my feet on his carved black walnut coffee table.

We talk in a superficially pleasant way about the new fragrance, about a trip to Geneva he and Maureen are planning to take. Something is different about him. I noticed it before. At dinner the week before there was a glassiness in his eye that I thought would pass and didn't. Now I see it again, the dullness. A laxness in his usually tense face, a subtle easing of his carriage. It's just a shade of difference, but he comes across as less the alpha male he's always been. Though I've spent my whole life fighting with Milosa, I've always respected him as a worthy opponent. So it troubles me to sense a weakening. I wonder if he's sick, or if the depression that's always dogged him is finally catching up, or if this is just the incremental lessening that happens as people age. There's no point in asking, for he denies infirmity on principle.

It's not long before he asks whether the ship that sank the
Molly Jones
was found.

I describe the Coast Guard's anemic investigation and Johnny's conclusion that the collision was a hit-and-run. Milosa listens with his eyelids half lowered, hiding his shrewd interest. Then I tell him about the paperwork Thomasina found and what I learned from Mrs. Smith about the bonuses and unofficial voyages. At this, his back straightens and a sharp gleam comes into his eyes.

In his heyday Milosa lived on the edge: romantic passion and whoring weren't opposites because they both brought him to a sharp, raw place. Business wasn't interesting unless it involved cheating the government or screwing a competitor. My violent near drowning and crazy survival captured his imagination. And now this. A trail of clues and contradictions is just the kind of problem that makes him glad to be alive. His fingers drum the desktop excitedly.

“Obviously,” he says, “the boat was a bribe to keep your friend from reporting whatever was happening on the secret voyages. And . . . have you thought of this? There was no accident. Your friend's death was murder.”

“The first part may be right, but the second part is ridiculous.”

“But you've considered it.”

“Yes, I have. But it doesn't make any sense. Why would a company bribe an employee one week and murder him the next? Why not get rid of him right away? And there are easier ways to kill a person than to plow into his lobster boat in heavy fog.” I don't say,
Then there's the problem of me
.
Why kill a second person as well?